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Last week’s Executive Forum focused on the Voice of the Customer (VoC), and it was great to hear directly from the team at Co-Op Member and Customer Services – winners of the 2017 Best Voice of the Customer Initiative. Specifically, they were able to share how their programme is busy turning conversations into insights to deliver a better experience for customers.

The Co-Op team detailed how their structured VoC programme is helping them to shift from an operational to a value-add focus. What resonated particularly for our attendees was the Co-Op’s ability not just to pick-up on customer issues, but also to then associate their subsequent resolution with a business value. For example, when a change to the recipe of one of the Co-Op’s frozen pizzas had caused some customer concerns, they were able to match this precisely to a related drop in sales. Being able to link these two events meant that the retailer was able to focus in on the root cause of the problem and move towards a swifter resolution.

This ability to attach value to improvements in customer service is powerful, indeed it was one of the key factors behind why mobile telecoms operator Lebara was able to win multiple major ECCCSA awards over recent years. Tracking conversations through to root cause analysis and resolution is clearly important, however, it’s being able to consistently deliver these new insights as part of a sustained VoC programme that is even more significant – and can provide customer engagement teams with an essential way of demonstrating the value of their ongoing contact centre and CX activities.

Being smart about data

Two key VoC learnings that the Co-Op shared with our Executive Forum attendees were that you need to minimise the amount of new data that you feed into the programme, and also that you actually don’t always need massive tech investments in machine learning, AI and Big Data to make VoC work.

Given that Harvard Business Review reported last year that – on average – less than half an organisation’s structured data is currently being actively used to support decision-making, most organisations clearly still have some way to go in making sense of the data they’ve already got. As the Co-Op explained, the answers are often already there in your data, you just need to be smart about the datasets that you bring together. Capturing customer conversations, and acting on them, is clearly an essential part of this process.

At their heart, Voice of the Customer programmes are all about addressing stakeholder issues and being responsive – particularly when it comes to responding to specific customer concerns. An example of just how effective this can be happened earlier this month when a Tesla Model 3 owner was involved in an accident. The crash shattered the vehicle’s central touchscreen, preventing the driver from opening the glovebox and accessing his insurance details. The owner shared his experience online and was impressed when Tesla CEO Elon Musk replied the next day saying that he was immediately adding a software feature to open the Model 3’s glovebox automatically when the car comes to a stop after a crash, and that he would also look at adding an additional plastic sheet to the screen. That’s really listening to the Voice of the Customer!